


Fairy Tale Wishes and Dreams

by Lisa_Telramor



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms
Genre: Brooding, Fairy Tale Elements, Gen, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-08-09
Packaged: 2018-04-13 20:00:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4535373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lisa_Telramor/pseuds/Lisa_Telramor
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Life can't always be a fairy tale even if it is set up like one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fairy Tale Wishes and Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: fairy tales, author's choice, in the darkness of your room, your mother calls you by your true name

To the world you are ‘boy’ and ‘child’ and ‘lout.’ You dodge kicks and snarled words, keeping your head down and doing what you’re told because that is how the world works. There are the men and women that run it, and there are people like you, children of such low birth that you’re lucky to be alive.

 

Mother sings nursery rhymes and fairy tales. The boy slays a giant. The girl becomes a princess. The rich lose and the poor win. A beast sheds its skin and becomes a man. Cows can jump the moon. The songs and stories are short and told in the glow of the hearth coals that get gray ash and black soot streaked along your face like the girl who slept in the hearth ashes and won the heart of a prince with her shoe.

 

You will win no hearts.

 

You are not the goose girl or tricky thief. You are not the youngest of three to set out on a quest. You are not brilliant or beautiful. You are a too-thin child with soot in your hair and bruises on your knees and blisters on your hands. There are no dragons to slay but there are chores to do. There is no magic feast, but scraps leftover from meals are good enough to feed you as they are to feed the dogs or pigs.

 

Mother tells stories full of impossible tasks, and those impossible tasks become your own, running chores like weaving nettles into shirts until your fingers bleed.

 

In the fairy tales so few have names. Who is the goose girl but the goose girl? The shoemaker makes shoes, the selkie is a what not a who, and the witch is never a real person. You would be the scullery boy if tales were real. Like the girl in cinders, you would have a godmother—more than a mother because mothers are fragile things and die, like you know your mother will die one day, like all parents die one day—who would magic you to a better life. If you were in a fairy tale, the cook would be the giant toppled from his beanstalk, the master of the house would be the deposed king, his wife would be the stepmother with her feet forced into red hot shoes to dance until her death. You are as nameless as so many fairy tale beings, but you are not one.

 

If you were the beast, you could transform. If you were the hero, you could have a quest to come out the better for. If you were a prince you could seek. If you were a princess you could have happiness come to you. You are ‘boy’ and not worth more than the dogs you eat alongside.

 

At night, mother whispers your true name, and you are not ‘boy.’ You are ‘Joss,’ ‘Jocelyn,’ ‘Josie.’

 

She weaves stories like a witch weaves fate and you let yourself dream that the warm cocoon of her arms around you can transform you like fairy tale magic into a better person and a better life.

**Author's Note:**

> Note: Jocelyn is a female name. This character was supposed to read as either male/female or both.


End file.
